In Stefano Cagol’s solo show curated by Gregor Jansen, new oxymorons are triggered – through video and installation – by signaling and dialoging actions that hit political borders, natural borders, mental borders.
Developed through the joining of opposites, the splitting of like entities, through “parallel convergences” that generate a liminal landscape and a territory on borders, the solo show CONCILIO ideally starts from Stefano Cagol’s place of birth, “a territory marking the passage between South and North, Rome and Wittenberg, between Italy and Germany: Trento, Trentino South Tyrol.” The very first reference to his city of origin is to be found in the title which draws back immediately to the Concilio di Trento, the Council of Trient. So sense of belonging, identity and history correspond to a site and to an historical landmark, to what is nowadays defined as a very “unpredictable event” – i.e. an event with a controversial influence reaching our daily complexities from a very distant past – that brings also the opposite idea of tension towards the unknown and the unforeseen.

Within the frame of San Gallo Church of the 15th century, a symbolic presence, a complex pyramidical structure connects different faces to a unique apex. In this way, it evokes the idea of synergy, of coincidence, of “parallel convergences, the not univocal idea of “council,” and refers also to the public art intervention just realised by Cagol for the new A22 gate of Trento: a permanent monumental installation of 16 tons of steel.
In the video installation, other oppositions are protagonists – atmospheres of ice and snow, wind and water, of ethereal flames and light. The artist has gone beyond the Arctic Polar Circle, to a place characterized by a series of convergences of dissonances: it is the Barents region, the meeting point of the Norwegian, Finnish, and Russian borders. Chosen in the moment in which the short sun becomes pallid like the snow of the mountains that it licks. There, the artist has given life to a series of “actions on the border:” signals that underline a border, different borders, but at the same time they shake them, they cross them. They are actions of signaling and communicating, of control and passage.